Must We Divide History Into Periods? (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)

Le Goff, Jacques

ISBN 10: 0231173016 / ISBN 13: 9780231173018

Published by Columbia University Press (edition Reprint), 2017

It's a preowned item in good condition and includes all the pages. It may have some general signs of wear and tear, such as markings, highlighting, slight damage to the cover, minimal wear to the binding, etc., but they will not affect the overall reading experience. Seller Inventory # 0231173016-11-1

Synopsis:

We have long thought of the Renaissance as a luminous era that marked a decisive break with the past, but the idea of the Renaissance as a distinct period arose only during the nineteenth century. Though the view of the Middle Ages as a dark age of unreason has softened somewhat, we still locate the advent of modern rationality in the Italian thought and culture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Jacques Le Goff pleads for a strikingly different view. In this, his last book, he argues persuasively that many of the innovations we associate with the Renaissance have medieval roots, and that many of the most deplorable aspects of medieval society continued to flourish during the Renaissance. We should instead view Western civilization as undergoing several "renaissances" following the fall of Rome, over the course of a long Middle Ages that lasted until the mid-eighteenth century. While it is indeed necessary to divide history into periods, Le Goff maintains, the meaningful continuities of human development only become clear when historians adopt a long perspective. Genuine revolutions-the shifts that signal the end of one period and the beginning of the next-are much rarer than we think.

About the Author: Jacques Le Goff (1924-2014), for many years director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, was a highly influential member of the Annales School. Among his other works are Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages and Constructing the Past: Essays in Historical Methodology. M. B. DeBevoise translates from the French and Italian in every branch of scholarship.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Must We Divide History Into Periods? (...
Publisher: Columbia University Press (edition Reprint)
Publication Date: 2017
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Good
Edition: Reprint.